The secret to mastering life's biggest transitions | Bruce Feiler
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What is a “lifequake” and how often do we experience them?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Today's episode of TED Talks Daily is presented by Walmart Business. Most of us picture our lives moving in a straight line: school, then career, family, retirement, each stage arriving right on schedule. But writer Bruce Filer spent years discovering that almost no one actually lives that way. After traveling around the US and collecting hundreds of life stories from people in all fifty states, he kept finding the same thing. Our lives are full of disruptions, and every so often one of them cracks everything wide open.
One in ten becomes what I call a lifequake, a massive burst of change that leads to a period of upheaval, transition, and renewal. The average person goes through three to five of these events in the course of their lives, their average length, five years.
Do the math, Bruce says, and that means we could spend up to twenty-five years, half of our adult lives, in transition. In this talk, he shares the framework he built from a thousand hours of interviews and makes the case that navigating change isn't just something that happens to us, it's a skill we can learn.
A life transition is fundamentally a meaning-making experience. It's what I like to call an autobiographical occasion. in which we are called on to revisit, rewrite, and retell our life story, adding a new chapter for what we learned during the life quake.
Bruce's own turning point began with a phone call about his father and a single question that changed everything that came after. He argues that no matter how bleak the story gets, you can't give up on the happy ending because you control the story you tell about yourself. That's coming up.
I used to have a saying that phone calls don't change your life. Until one day I got a phone call that did. It was from my mother. Your father is trying to kill himself. He's what? My dad was a son of the American South. A navy veteran and civic leader, he was never depressed a minute. Until he got Parkinson's. Six times in twelve weeks my dad attempted to end his life. We tried every solution imaginable. Until one day I had a thought. Maybe my dad needed a spark to restart his life story. One morning I sent him a question. Tell me about the toys you played with as a child. What happened next changed not only him but everyone around him. And led me to reimagine how we all make meaning, purpose, and joy in our lives.
This is the story of what happened next and what we all can learn from it. I want you to stop for a second and listen to the story going on in your head. It's there, somewhere in the background.
How did Bruce Feiler’s father’s crisis inspire a storytelling breakthrough?
It's the story you tell others when you first meet them, the story you tell yourself every day. І це сторія хую. Where you came from, where you're going. І це сторі олифай. What we've learned from a generation of brain research is that story isn't just part of us, it is us in a fundamental way. Ліф історію тіл єсеф. But there's something that research hasn't much answered. What happens when we misplace the plot of that story? When we get sidetracked by a pitfall, a pothole, a pandemic. What happens when we feel burned out and need a fresh start? What happens when our fairy tales go awry? That's what happened to my dad that fall, to me around that time, to all of us at one time or another.
We get stuck in the woods and can't get out. This time though, I wanted to learn how to get unstuck. Like my dad, I was born in the American South. And for years I had what I now think of as a linear life. I went to college, I started writing, I did it for no money for a while, I had some success, I got married and had children. But then in my forties, I was just walloped by life. First, I got cancer as a new dad of identical twin daughters. Then I almost went bankrupt. Then my dad had that suicide spree. For a long time I felt shame and fear about these events. I didn't know how to tell that story. I didn't want to tell that story.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is a “lifequake” and how often do we experience them?
0:03–3:05
2
How did Bruce Feiler’s father’s crisis inspire a storytelling breakthrough?
3:05–5:53
3
What does the research reveal about the myth of a linear life?
5:53–8:53
4
What are the 52 “disruptors” that trigger major life transitions?
8:53–12:18
5
How can we identify and use our personal transition superpower?
12:18–14:27
6
Which emotions dominate during a life transition and how can we manage them?
14:27–17:07
7
What practical tools and rituals help navigate the messy middle of change?
17:07–19:24
8
How can we rewrite our life story to create a hopeful ending?
19:24–22:13
Speakers
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